“You have two Golden upgrades to pick,” Hedy said, looking at her tablet. Despite our winning, she could read the room and was acting unusually subdued. “You got a key, too, meaning you can go into any of the old houses in the cul-de-sac. If you’re thinking you might want to trade vehicles, maybe you should be considering doing that first before you pick.”

“We’re going into the house of One Fine Pig,” I said. “If it’s there, it’ll be that armored vehicle, and by this point, I think ours is the better choice. They spent too many of their upgrades on weapons.”

Hedy nodded. “You could try to get that Onikuma. It’s a good mount.” She gave a nervous look at Donut. “Or, you know, Old Shuck⁠—”

“No,” Donut said.

I let out a humorless laugh. “I thought you didn’t like mounts?”

Hedy shrugged. “Always good to have options. I think vehicles is better, especially when my life is on the line. But it might be nice to have a beastie in here, too. We’ll maybe get another gremlin if you pick one up. But it ain’t no matter to me. It’s not like I’m lonely or anything.” She returned her attention back to her tablet.

Imani: Zhang and Tran are with us at the Lollipop. Come when you can.

Donut: IS ZHANG OKAY?

Imani: Not really. We’re working on a plan right now. Elle went over to their guild to try to talk Li Na into coming out. She says Na is just sitting there meditating. Her health is in the yellow. She’s been poisoned, like you said.

Carl: Going to finish our upgrades, use the key, and pick up some things from Mordecai, and we’ll be out there.

Imani: Louis just used his key to add a gecko to his garage. He followed your advice about the hidden room, and he found an engineer in there. But there were mobs in the house, so be careful.

Behind us, the truck swarmed with the generated gremlins, who still continued to shriek and flip me off whenever I made the mistake of looking directly at one. Jamal was there on the ground with Mongo, watching them work. Bigs and Samantha had both wandered out here the moment the race was over and both were riding atop Jamal’s head, heckling the workers.

I could still taste Lucienne, and no matter how much water I drank, I couldn’t get the terrible tang out of my mouth. We hadn’t stayed to see Dwight cross the finish line, but Jasha and Radoslav had found the unicorn sitting there, spinning in a circle just outside the exit. They’d dragged him in.

I still didn’t know if that was a mistake, but it was done.

Of the fifty-five hundred people who’d made it to this floor, we now had less than three thousand left. These last few races were going to be brutal.

“It says we need vertical climb and inverted racing, and we need to cover gaps of more than a hundred meters,” I said.

Hedy nodded, flipping through her table. “I’m thinking we do one Golden upgrade and three regulars. That way we can use that regular option to upgrade your Bubble Buddy shield to the golden version, pick two more regular upgrades, and then pick a good golden one. We definitely need the shield upgrade. Your containment will protect you, but containments is gonna be breaking left and right. It’s gonna be a crowded race. The full Bubble Buddy will protect against molten steel and whatnots. But not for the whole race, so you gotta be careful.”

“The regular version is a good shield. It held except when we were getting hit by all the gingers.”

“Yup,” Hedy said. “It’s great for smaller critters. But it don’t float. If we upgrade it all the way, it’ll be much better.”

We talked for a good while, going over all the options. In the end, we went with the Bubble Buddy upgrade, a heat sink in case we lost our containment, and the regular version of the same booster rockets that team Sparkles had, which, when combined with the bubble, would allow us to cover large jumps.

For our Golden upgrade, we went with Roller Limbo, a trans-dimensional upgrade that would allow us to race upside down. And as long as there was a gap of at least ten centimeters, we could change shape and slip under any obstacle, including other vehicles.

After Hedy left to start shouting orders at the gremlins, Samantha approached. She floated there, sniffing at my crotch.

“Hey, stop that,” I said, pushing her away.

She growled and then floated up so we were eye to eye. A few hours earlier she hadn’t been able to do this. But like with every floor so far, she got more and more powerful the longer the floor went on.

“Why do you smell like Chachi?” she demanded. “Little Carl doesn’t smell like it, but the rest of you does. What have you been getting up to? You know most ladies aren’t into frottage, right? How boring. If you’re going to commit to intercourse, you have to be aggressive about it. You should kill something together and bathe in the blood first before you both howl in climax. If you want, I can give you growling lessons. Women like it when their man growls with passion.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You know, Chachi? Chalchiuhtlicue?” she said. “Wears a green skirt? Talks kinda funny? Cries a lot? Oh, Carl. Are you hiding her from me because you think I’ll be jealous? That’s so adorable.”

“Uh,” I said. That was the name of the creature Lucia had mentioned.

Samantha took a deep breath. “Okay, normally after I break up with someone, I don’t like to give out relationship advice. I really think you need to make your own mistakes. It helps you realize what you lost when you screwed up with me, but I’ll make an exception in this case. Chachi is pretty. I’ll give you that. But she’s a little cuckoo. Not all that emotionally stable. Likes to talk a lot about how she’s all into saving the lives of children, but then she just kills them all. Like everywhere she goes, it’s dead babies left and right. I gotta tell you, Carl. Donut was correct. You need to stop dry-humping crazy. You think I’m a psycho ex-girlfriend? Hooboy. She’s the type of chick who’ll set all your chonies on fire. Even the pair you’re wearing. And if you’re triple-dipping with her and Eris and your new wife? That’s a lot of work, and you don’t even have a mustache. What do you think is going to happen when Chachi finds out? You really should follow Louis’s example. He’s a one-woman type of guy. That’s why Juice Box couldn’t handle him.”

“Wait, this . . . Chachi. She kills children?”

“Oh, yes. She’s always so high and mighty, always talking about how she’s protecting them, but the second something bad or inconvenient happens, she’s like ‘We need to sacrifice a seven-year-old to make things right.’ She even did it once at a Yarilo party because the meatballs had cilantro in them. She sent out an emergency prayer request and had her worshippers kill a whole village day care in the hopes the next waiter would bring her something that didn’t taste like soap. She probably could’ve just asked the server guy, but I will say this. It worked. The next tray they brought out were these amazing little hot dog things wrapped in orc bacon. Delicious. Even Otis-Ray liked them, and he’s normally a vegetarian.”

A deep sense of alarm started to fill me. I replayed my conversation with Lucia Mar and that girl, Azra. That goddess appeared to be one of the ones who’d escaped the dungeon. And she was in there with the kids stuck inside of Lucia Mars’s head.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said.

Samantha shook her head sadly. “Yeah. I hope you got a coat for Little Carl.”